Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will require much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored using identical amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than info can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce several daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them because they need considerably less space compared to standard backups.